Old phone as media server

Want to use old phone as media server, any guide present?
Any apps i can start of with?
Main purpose to watch movies, tv shows on Fire TV and tablet

what phone is that? i doubt you could transcode videos with a phone cpu.

1 Like

It’s realme 6
Don’t need any transcoding
Files are not very big, tv shows 1.5gb each eps
Movies less than 6-8gb
The clients can handle

Will try out
For playback on Android devices there’s is time limit, plex pass subscriptions is required, is it?

Try this:

this seems device specific?

Be careful of battery swelling and/or exploding if you are going to keep the phone connected to power 24x7. Phones always work off of battery even when connected to power unlike laptops. So, the battery is always charging and discharging which is not how the battery is supposed to be used.

2 Likes

you will have to root the phone in order to change the port SMB works upon. then it can easily do all that. Act as a file server, watch movies from it directly and etc.

will only rooting make it work as a file server?

proper samba server requires using port 445 and linux kernel requires root for opening any port <1024

Ok, I will try to root the device and see what can be done
Just want repurpose an old device

I have rooted my phone
How to start a samba server on phone,
Many client apps are there

Tried, gets disconnected after a while

You can run any of the media servers over Linux on Android. Termux is one option. However, any encoding will be in software only.

Any guide that I can follow on? Storage mount can be issue?

you can even install linux

there’s

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.webrox.landrive

which is paid and it has some discoverability and speed issues. there’s actually not any proper solution

Sell the phone, add money get n100 mini
Pc. Or rpi 5.

I think for now rpis is not value for money as they are tending to get more costly better to buy old or new mini pcs instead